Last Thursday at the Karaoke pub, I had the dubious privilege of sitting through two Eminem "songs", (rattled out by a shrill white woman - make of that what you will). So I sat there listening and reading along, (because this particular dj posts the words for everyone) and thinking "Fine. This gentleman (writer, not current performer) has certain undeniable talent with rhyming words and rhythms, and obviously has a lot to say. But why does he need to do it over top an Aerosmith song?"

Only now, via insomnia and procrastination, do I realize that it is intended as a sort of background music, a soundtrack if you will. He figured that "Dream On" would enhance his story.

Looked at this way, I can almost appreciate it. It's performance and poetry. But I have to put my foot down before anyone calls it "music".

Insofar as many poetic forms throughout history are properly performed (rather than read) and that many examples are indeed sung (one sings the Qu'ran, for instance, for full effect, and what are Gregorian Chants if not early rap?) leading up to the age of the troubadours, who "sang: their alliterative and stanza-centric "news" wherever they went, rap certainly does fit in that ambiguous area between what we call Music and simple poetry. That said, Sturgeon's Law is even, more in force than in other forms, it seems, and 95% of it is crap. Too much of it is used to express anger, but why should that garner indignation, especially from those of us for whom Won't Get Fooled Again was a cultural battlecry and Time (Chambers Brotrhers) an anthem?

I don't like rap. The backing tracks are usually too damn loud and compete with the lyric content, which is the whole point of the form, so it comes out to my ear as an atonal mush. But as I've said before, saying you don't like something is not the same as saying it's bad. Other standards apply.

Okay, rappers use turntables for backbeats. There's a whole industry in the field in "beats" which apparently are identifiable with certain rappers. We've moved way past the days when two discarded turntables were wired into a portable sound system and now those DJ rigs cost almost as much as a keyboard array, so let's stop this "po folk" nonsense. If that were the case, then no poor black person would ever have made music before the advent of rap, "'cause all those instruments cost too damn much and I got no bread." That's bullshit.

Rap came out of a recognition that "message music" has one drawback---the music tends to mute the message, especially if what you want to do is harangue instead of sing. Street games like Dozens fed into it and a form was adapted to a new kind of dance performance, which in many ways is a modern African American adaptation of the square dance call. It was fun and became marketable and now we have what we have.

I don't like rap. But I also don't like opera. Are they comparable in any way?

What gets hard is to remember that it's personal taste and that, unless we're trying to proselytize, is not really open for analysis. Right now I'm listening to Juno Reactor. I really like their stuff, but it's not much more than a set of complex beats with a thin riff overlay. At least on first listen. I'll admit that a lot more is going on that is not immediately apparent. The same can be said for rap.

But we get into these long digressions when someone tries to make something more emblematic of more things than it can bear.

I never said punk isn't music, I just said I thought most of it was crap. If I recall, when Steve Allen said that rock had not yet reached it true potential and a lot of it was crap. But he was speaking in comparisons. I think I allowed that rap is a form of music, it certainly uses music, and I even suggested (not quite as frivolously as might have been thought) that Gregorian Chants could be seen as early forms of rap. I just think most of it is crap.

I just ordered West,Bruce, & Laing's debut album, Why Dont'cha?. When I saw the DVD of the Cream reunion tour several years ago, I thought Jack looked the worst of the bunch, a few steps from death's door. Rough damn life, but what a player!

I enjoyed Cream but always thought JB's subsequent career much more interesting. I especially favor his mid-70s work which I suppose you'd call "jazz-rock" but in the best sense of the word. What made it so successful was that it wasn't based on just chops like a lot of those so-called "fusion" bands, but on composition. I love Bruce's sense of melody. And I like his singing too which critics weren't always so kindly towards. And of course what everybody already knows, that he was one of the best electric bassists there's ever been. He could have spent his entire career being a hired gun and still be famous. Nice obit in today's NYTs.

To anyone not familiar with Bruce's career after Cream allow me to recommend a 3 CD set called Spirit:Live at the BBC which is just what it says. Three live sets from the 70s with various stellar players. The highlight for me is the 2nd CD with his band that included Mick Taylor and Carla Bley. That CD is the audio of The Old Grey Whistle Test set I linked to before.

“We must not always talk in the marketplace,” Hester Prynne said, “of what happens to us in the forest.”-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter